


earth to earth, ashes to ashes

by Rodimiss



Series: refractions [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Gen, Return to Ostagar DLC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-18
Updated: 2016-07-18
Packaged: 2018-07-19 18:31:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7372852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rodimiss/pseuds/Rodimiss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Ostagar again, Avrian Mahariel is stubborn, Alistair is awkward, and Wynne lets the boys do the heavy lifting. Or: Avrian and Alistair talk about brothers, and funerals.</p>
            </blockquote>





	earth to earth, ashes to ashes

Wynne and Alistair stop, speak in hushed voices, look around at the snow settled on ruins and bodies; but Avrian doesn’t falter as he walks through the old fortress. They have to hurry to catch up to him, several times, though he’s an elf, shorter legs, shorter stride. He isn’t fazed by the death; nothing seems to faze him. Alistair thought that was bravery, at first, but now he thinks it’s apathy.

“I’m Dalish,” Avrian says, with a twisted smile, when Alistair finally addresses him. “All we have are ruins. This is….” He pauses, searching for a word.

“If you say ‘homely,’ I’m going to have to strangle you,” Alistair says, and Avrian rarely jokes, so Alistair doubts he would say that, but his words get something of a chuckle from Wynne behind them.

Avrian snorts. "Familiar," he says, and he looks around at the snow, the tufts of dead grass poking through it, the skeletons strewn across the land. “Our clan lived often in the Brecilian Forest,” he adds after a bit of time where the only sound is the crunch of their boots in the snow. “Everything is alive there. Even the trees are angry if you offend them, and they _will_ take their vengeance. This?” He gestures to the broken pillars in front of them, and in the distance, darkspawn black against the landscape. He takes his bow from his back. “This is positively welcoming.” 

He nocks an arrow and lets it fly.

Halfway across the stone bridge, Cailan’s body is strung up, riddled with wounds from blades and arrows, a shaft still sticking from his shoulder. “When we’re done here,” Alistair says, “with the darkspawn, we should see him off to the Maker properly.” And he looks to Avrian, because most often, he makes the final call.

“Of course,” he says, and he adds, quieter, “I confess I don’t know what shemlen funeral rites are. What do you do with your dead?”

“We burn them, as Andraste burned,” Wynne answers. “And you?”

Alistair has wondered, too.

“We bury our dead,” Avrian says, “as long as there is a body.”

This is the most Alistair has heard him willingly speak, ever, and so he’s surprised when, later, as the two of them pile wood together for a pyre, strip down fences and the skeletons of tents without Wynne’s help, Avrian addresses him again. “Is this a funeral for a brother or a king?” he asks, and Alistair blinks and stares at him.

“I’m… sorry?”

“Do you want to give Cailan proper rites because he is your brother, or because he is your king?”

“Aaaand saying that no one deserves to be desecrated like that by the darkspawn is…. not a possible answer?”

Avrian raises an eyebrow. “They did that to him because he was king,” he says, firmly, like Alistair didn’t answer his question but that’s okay because he’s come to the answer himself, now. 

“Bit of a personal question, don’t you think that was?” Alistair asks, and Avrian recoils like it didn’t occur to him that they’ve never had any heavy emotion-laden conversations before – and haven’t spoken of Alistair’s birthright since that initial conversation on the outskirts of Redcliffe.

“I… was concerned with how this might hurt you,” Avrian says, sounding almost reluctant to admit to considering Alistair’s potential feelings _._ “To bury a brother is…”

Cailan is being burned, not buried. Alistair isn’t sure they’re talking about Cailan. After a pause, Avrian finally says, “At least you have a body,” and oh, they _are_ talking about Cailan, but they aren’t, too. “At least you know what happened.”

“What happened?” Alistair repeats, and he’s not sure if he’s asking for clarification about why Avrian mentions that question or just asking that question. Avrian doesn’t look at him. Alistair goes all in. “Did you… have a brother?”

“Bit of a personal question,” Avrian echoes dryly, lifting another log onto the pile, and then leans against the skeleton of their pyre. “Yes. His name is Tamlen.”

 _Is._ That’s a funny word to use in talks of burials and burnings, but Avrian tells a story of ruins, and mirrors, and blood tainted long before the Joining, and at the end of it he says, “The clan held a funeral, without a body, when he isn’t even dead.”

He says that with such certainty that Alistair almost believes him, _wants_ to believe him, but to be tainted this long is a death sentence even without vanishing into the magic of a strange mirror. “You remind me of him, sometimes,” Avrian says. “Stubborn. And stupid. Always getting into trouble. I don’t know if he’d like you or not.” He’s not lifting logs any more. “Keeper gave up, Duncan too, but I’ll find him. He always gets into trouble, and I always bring him home.”

Alistair looks at his brother’s body, battered by the darkspawn, and wishes that he never saw this. If Avrian’s brother lived through the taint, he’s a ghoul, and is better off not being found, for Avrian’s sake -- but Avrian is stubborn. It was one of the first things Alistair learned of his fellow warden, stubborn and clinging to one bit of hope even as he seems resigned to everything else falling apart all around them. “He can’t just be _gone,”_ Avrian says, and Alistair wonders how much he believes his own words, how much he's trying to convince Alistair like he tried to convince his clan and Duncan, and how much he's trying to convince himself.

Over Cailan's pyre, Avrian prays to gods Alistair doesn't recognize; for Alistair's brother, and for his own. Alistair doesn't know how to tell him that the name  _Tamlen_ belongs to a dead man or a ghoul,  _gone_ either way, and that the hope he carries isn't worth keeping.


End file.
